Fictional narratives by women writers underpin the indisputable fact that gender equality will not be possible till the mind is liberated from patriarchal, sexist value systems and till that happens, women will be in chains. It is the invisible chains that have silenced women and the silent suffering woman has been emblematic of romanticized notions of motherhood and nationhood. Women have been located as the preservers of tradition and culture and their passivity has been valorized as a cultural value. As a result, any resistance to this systematic and systemic eliding of the identity of the adult and mature woman is regarded as a stigma.
Bengali fictional narratives have reiterated the inexorable marginalization of the second sex, addressing the abjectness of women of all classes, their lack of identity and independence, and the uninhibited exploitation and oppression of women in a patriarchal social system. Women writers have sensitively represented the nuanced inter-personal relationships that interrogate the binaries of power and disempowerment that are inherent in the masculine and feminine cultural constructions.
The reputed translators, Chaitali Sengupta, Lopamudra Banerjee and Amita Ray's focussed endeavour in representing Bengali women's creative fiction, spanning a wide trajectory, from the colonial period to the post-colonial period and thereafter the era of globalization, are undoubtedly commendable. The translators have selected novellas written by Swarnakumari Devi Ghoshal (1855-1932) Ashapurna Devi (1909-1995) and Suchitra Bhattacharya (1950-2015).
The novella, as a literary genre, can be positioned mid-way between the concise short story and the expansive novel. The novella, therefore, can be described as a literary sub-genre, which borrows its structural uniqueness by combining the precision of short stories and the novel. The novella's intermediate identity has received both appreciation and criticism. The American author and critic Robert Silverberg had written, ""[The novella] is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus, it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel.""
Experienced translator Chaitali Sengupta's translation of Swarnakumari's novel Chinna Mukul (The uprooted blossom) was published in the year 1879. It is written against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. The protagonist in the story is a young woman called Kanak. It is the story of her failed love for Hirankumar, a deputy magistrate in Alipore court. Through her tribulations, the novel depicts how women were not given the freedom to spend their lives as they chose and helps us to understand patriarchal domination. Historically, Chinna Mukul (The uprooted blossom) may be regarded as the first nebulous evidence of a feminist voice interrogating gender inequality. This is, of course, done in a covert manner, noticeably different from Bengali women's writing of the post-independence period.
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